The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
It is commonly required in the field of Information Technology to provide a service that searches through data sources. The data source herein may refer to data and/or document(s) on the Internet, intranet, storage devices, and so on. In order to use a search engine, a user seeking information on a desired topic generally inputs a search query consisting of keyword(s) or phrase(s) relevant to the topic into the search interface of the search engine. In response, the search engine typically displays a report with a prioritized list of links pointing to relevant documents containing the search keywords. Oftentimes, a short summary of text i.e., extract/snippet is also included for each result. The extract/snippet is that portion or portions of the text in the document that contain the keywords from the search query.
While the popularity of search engines may rely on various factors; relevancy of the search results and the manner in which they are displayed play an important role in enhancing a user experience. Known search engines like Google®, Bing®, Yahoo® etc. typically display a search result page comprising multiple search results and for each search result an extract in a textual format. This is a disadvantage since some important visual cues in the document may be lost, thereby making the results less useful to a user. One example of such disadvantage is when the documents contain timeline data. When a user enters the search query for which a relevant result comprises a timeline, the search engines only display a relevant portion of the timeline based on keywords and few fragments around the keywords in a text format that makes it less useful for the reader.
Yet another drawback of existing search engines is that they fail to present results in a way that is easy for the user to understand the nature and type of results.
Systems for searching the Intranets, Extranets, Local Area Networks, individual computers and even single documents also generally suffer from these same drawbacks.
In view of the above drawbacks, there remains a need for an effective method of searching data sources for useful information relating to topics of user's interest.